On July 15, 1954 a seventy-nine-year old man found himself in front of the magistrates court in Lincoln charged with breaking the Obscene Publications Act (1857). How he got there sheds a fascinating light on British culture and moral attitudes.
In an age of instant communication and oversharing, it is easy to forget that sending a postcard to friends and relatives was de rigueur for holidaymakers, informing them of their safe arrival and some brief details of their experience. Postcards made their first appearance in Britain in 1870. They were plain, the front reserved for the address with an imprinted halfpenny stamp, half the price to post a letter, and the back reserved for a message. They proved enormously popular, with over 75 million sent in Britain in 1871, rising to over 800 million by 1910.
The Post Office’s monopoly on the production of postcards was broken in 1894 with the introduction of picture cards followed, in 1902, by the familiar divided back postcard, with room for both the address and the message on the back, and an image on the front. One of the first companies to exploit this new market was Bamforth & Company Limited of Holmfirth, switching from portrait photography in 1903, often using scenery sets from their photography work. In 1910 they began to tap into an even more lucrative market, employing the skills of Donald McGill amongst others, to produce saucy postcards to sell to holidaymakers.
Over a fifty year period McGill, the “King of the Saucy Postcard”, produced around 12,000 designs, for each of which he never received more than three guineas, which adorned some 200 million postcards. He categorized the vulgarity of his work as mild, medium or strong, calling them a “skit on pornography”.
Women were either young and shapely or middle-aged and fat, men were hen-pecked or strapping Adonises, professionals were stereotyped, lawyers as swindlers, vicars nervous and inept, and double-entendres and schoolboy humour ruled the roost. One of McGill’s designs showing a bookish man asking a pretty woman whether she liked Kipling to which she replied “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled!” sold over six million copies, a world record.
It was as if there was a complete transformation of the British psyche when they went on holiday. Those who would ordinarily reject any form of impropriety could not get enough of the postcards which were wildly successful. Writing in 1941, George Orwell described them as “a genre of their own, specializing in a very “low” humour, the mother-in-law, baby’s nappy, policeman’s boot type of joke, and distinguishable from all other kinds by having no artistic pretension”.
Although he appeared to be sniffy about them, Orwell was not advocating that they disappear. Instead he thought that they fulfilled a psychological need, appealing to the baseness to which we all need from time to time to express or as he put it, “on the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time”. To illustrate Orwell’s point by the early 1950s Bamforth’s series of comic postcards was its best-selling line, leading Punch magazine to hail McGill as “the most popular, hence most eminent English painter of the century”.
However, not everyone shared Punch’s enthusiasm or Orwell’s understanding and there was to be a sea change in the attitude of public authorities which was to imperil the future of the saucy seaside postcard. Believing that public morals had declined during the Second World War and that the dial needed to be reset, the director of public prosecutions, Sir Theobald Mathew, together with the police led the assault on postcard smut.
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